No Gays, Please, We're Americans

No Gays, Please, We're Americans - That's the title of Aubrey Sarvis' latest post over at Huffingtion Post that looks at the ridiculous lengths and amounts of money expended by the U. S. military to achieve recruiting goals rather than open the ranks of the military to gays. The reality is that millions of dollars are being squandered and questionable enlistees accepted rather than - heavens, the vapors - recruit qualified openly gay men and women. Yes, I have talked about this very topic before, but Sarvis' column demonstrates the idiocy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell in even more startling terms. Of course, supporters of the ban on gays - think Elaine Donnelly, Tony Perkins, James Dobson, et al - disseminate bullshit propaganda like the poster above left. What's amazing is that the anti-gay Christianists in the military are even willing to grant foreigners (typically, not one of their favored groups) citizenship rather than allow gays to serve. Here are some highlights from the column:

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[I]n the fiscal year that ended last October the Army exceeded by 517 its goal of 80,000 recruits. That's the good news. The bad news is that it failed yet again to meet its goal of 90 percent high school graduates. That's what waivers are for. You have a weight problem? No problem. The Army has been granting waivers for that -- and for serious felony convictions, for failure to meet physical and mental standards, for age (it's now 42 for new recruits) -- thousands of waivers every year -- as well as offering such enticements as whopping sign-up bonuses, as much as $40,000 for a few. Don't let me forget the free video games to simulate the "army experience."

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Now they've come up with another idea. . . . recruit legal residents here on temporary visas with skills "vital to the national interest." . . . The bait that's being dangled is a fast track to full citizenship -- six months for some. There are certain requirements -- language skills (interestingly, Spanish is not one of them) or medical training, for example. Julia Preston writes in the Times: "Recruiters expect that the temporary immigrants will have more education, foreign language skills and professional expertise than many Americans who enlist, helping the military to fill shortages in medical care, language interpretation and field intelligence analysis.

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Sadly I can't say that I'm incredulous but I can say that I marvel at the contortions our government goes through to avoid welcoming gays and lesbians openly into the armed services, whether they be skilled, highly skilled, or not skilled at all. Are we more dangerous than a Pashto-speaking kid who arrived a couple of years ago from Afghanistan?

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It is interesting that the State Department doesn't care about sexual orientation. Even more interesting, the civilian side of the Defense Department doesn't care. Private contractors don't care. In fact, they all want them and in many cases are aggressively recruiting the talented men and women who got the axe because of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and made the military weaker as a result. . . . Of course they are going back for two or three times what they were paid when in uniform.

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It is time for Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen to draw the final curtain on this theater of the absurd and go up to the Hill and tell Congress exactly what's what: that nobody cares about the sexual orientation of the soldier next to them in the line of fire.